Gay “Marriage” Fantasy
You really can't have "gay marriage," you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say.
You can have something some people call gay marriage because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to shake out its pockets.
Such is the supposed effect of the Iowa Supreme Court's declaration that gays and heterosexuals enjoy equal rights to marital bliss. Nope. They don't and won't, even if liberal Vermont follows Iowa's lead.
The human race—sorry ladies, sorry gents—understands marriage as a compact reinforcing social survival and projection. It has always been so. It will always be so, even if every state Supreme Court pretended to declare that what isn't suddenly is. Life does not work in this manner.
The supposed redefinition of the Great Institution is an outgrowth of modern hubris and disjointed individualism. "What I say goes!" has become our national philosophy since the 1960s. One appreciates the First Amendment right to make such a claim. Nonetheless, no such boast actually binds unless it corresponds with the way things are at the deepest level, human as well as divine. Surface things can change. Not the deep things, among them human existence.
A marriage—a real one—brings together man and woman for mutual society and comfort, but also, more deeply, for the long generational journey to the future. Marriage, as historically defined, across all religious and non-religious demarcations, is about children—which is why a marriage in which the couple deliberately repudiates childbearing is so odd a thing, to put the matter as generously as possible.
A gay "marriage" (never mind whether or not the couple tries to adopt) is definitionally sterile—barren for the purpose of extending the generations for purposes vaster than any two people, (including people of opposite sexes), can envision.
Current legal prohibitions pertaining to something called "gay marriage" don't address the condition called homosexuality or lesbianism. A lesbian or homosexual couple is free to do pretty much as they like, so long as it doesn't "like" too much the notion of remaking other, older ideas about institutions made, conspicuously, for others. Marriage, for instance.
True, marriage isn't the only way to get at childbirth and propagation. There's also the ancient practice called illegitimacy—in which trap, by recent count, 40 percent of American babies are caught. It's a lousy, defective means of propagation, with its widely recognized potential for enhancing child abuse and psychological disorientation.
Far, far better is marriage, with all those imperfections that flow from the participation of imperfect humans. Hence the necessity of shooing away traditional marriage's derogators and outright enemies—who include, accidentally or otherwise, the seven justices of Iowa's Supreme Court. These learned folk tell us earnestly that the right to "equal protection of the law" necessitates a makeover of marriage. And so, by golly, get with it, you cretins! Be it ordered that...
One can say without too much fear of contradiction that people who set themselves up as the sovereign arbiters of reality are—would "nutty" be the word?
The Iowa court's decision in the gay marriage case is pure nonsense. Which isn't to say that nonsense fails to command plaudits and excite warnings to others to "keep your distance." We're reminded again—as with Roe v. Wade, the worst decision in the history of human jurisprudence—of the reasons judges should generally step back from making social policy. For one thing, a judicial opinion can mislead viewers into supposing that, well, sophisticated judges wouldn't say things that weren't so. Would they?
Of course they would. They just got through doing it in Iowa, and now the basketball they tossed in the air has to be wrestled for, fought over, contested: not merely in Iowa, but everywhere Americans esteem reality over ideological fantasy and bloviation. A great age, ours. Say this for it anyway: We never nod off.
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Hear, Hear! The first fraud, however, is the unvoted theft of our republics to so-called democracies which are nothing more than oligarchies whose public face is a (seeming) supreme court consisting of the most highly vetted men the oligarchs can find. One antidote would be a red blooded governor, but none of the media (owned by -- would vampires be too strong) will allow them to campaign unbloodied. The other alternative would be people's legislatures, whose prerogatives are being stolen. But since they do the vetting, I fear the republics are lost.
I have read and heard Mr. Murchison's message countless times, expressed by him and many others. As far as it goes, it offers nothing to contest--or to enlighten. The Iowa supreme court decision, the Vermont legislation, and previous acts legalizing gay marriage should by now have wrung from Mr. Murchison and others the admission that the U.S. isn't a Christian country or, indeed, a religious country at all. It is and perhaps always has been a secular country that gives secular benefits to its citizens, among them recognition as couples commonly said to be married and any and all benefits and privileges attendant on such recognition. Given these realities, gay marriage is inevitable and even just. I have yet to hear from any opponent of gay marriage any strategy for stopping its progress that is even faintly likely within the time frames involved. It seems to me that only genuine Christian conversion on a scale larger than ever before would have any effect.
@2, Mr. Ray Olson: "It seems to me that only genuine Christian conversion on a scale larger than ever before would have any effect." Yes, very true, but from the present perspective, unfortunately, dubious.
So they will not be able to reproduce naturally, so they'll bully the Immigration bureuacrats to allow them to adopt third world children who will then undoubtedly grow up to become delinquents who'll clog up our prison system 20 years from now.
What is interesting is that during the 1960s, Sexual Revolutionaries accused marriage of being the "central institution of oppression in patriarchal society." The homosexual liberation movement was supposed to be one part of the Sexual Revolution which was going to "smash" monogamy in general and marriage in particular. Now today, marriage is a state to which all right-thinking folks must aspire.
Why the ideological turnaround? Is it a bizarre inversion of politics? Or is it that once having smashed traditional marriage (via the 50+% divorce rate and the high out of wedlock rate), the revolutionaries are now moving in to take over the institution?
Stay tuned, one suspects we are only in the second act of this production.
Mr. Olson,
"legalizing gay marriage should by now have wrung from Mr. Murchison and others the admission that the U.S. isn’t a Christian country or, indeed, a religious country at all. It is and perhaps always has been a secular country that gives secular benefits to its citizens, among them recognition as couples commonly said to be married and any and all benefits and privileges attendant on such recognition."
Well said. It would be helpful to a thread of this sort to read Friedrick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, for a more principled view of the thinking involved in the Iowa and Vermont acts, as well as this whole issue of providing legal justification and protection for cultural suicide. You have always had a quiet knack for seeing through the shadow and disguise to the very principles involved in these rather chaotic and noisy issues. I am pleased to see some of your posts appearing from time to time and always make an effort to read them through. Thanks for your thoughts.
Mr. Olson, I agree with Robert (6). I appreciate your comments and you provide a very worthwhile realist contribution to these discussions.
Dear Robert and Dr. Wilson,
Thanks for your thanks. And to Robert: I read Engels' Origin so long ago that I've since quite forgotten it. It is true that sometimes Engels--Marx, too--are enlightening. "Cultural suicide"? A bit strong. "Impoverishment," "self-mutilation," "diminution" seem more like it to me.
I must fess up that I know several gay couples who have kept their troth, unplighted though it may be, faithfully for longer than most married couples I've known. I don't begrudge them the legislated benefits granted the married--inheritance, hospital privileges, power of attorney, etc. (having been unmarried for so long, I can't recall them all).
Hi Ray, good comments. As you know I myself am an ordained Deacon and am faced with the question of what to do with couples coming to me to be married while they are living together. This is almost 100% of the applicants. We do indeed live in a secular society where marriage is an event that is more "Hollywood" than real. It is based on a dream rather than a reality. These couples are not aware that they are devaluing the sacrament that we call marriage while they are "playing house". I am not sure how to handle this as the Bishop seems to endorse marrying these couples. My Pastor certainly does. I guess my question is "if we no longer know what real marriage is.. as in... between a man and a women how do we expect to explain this to a gay couple"? We cannot even explain it to a straight couple. I am afraid that I may end up refusing to do these weddings and then falling out of favor with the Bishop.
Deacon Steve
Woodcutter #9
I was not proposing gay marriage I was simply pointing out that it is consistent with what Engels and all those of social contract fame believe about law and order.
By the way, Engels saw long engagements as a preliminary practice for future prostitution and of course also wanted women out in the work force where they could obtain their freedom and independence from husbands, the rearing of children and the boredom of their own homes -- All notes we hear played today in the contemporary buzz. My guess is that Limbaugh and the libertarians would certainly be in favor of all this as it is so geared towards individual freedom at the expense of tradition and longevity. But I digress. Good luck.
@9, woodcutter: "I guess my question is “if we no longer know what real marriage is.. as in… between a man and a women how do we expect to explain this to a gay couple”? We cannot even explain it to a straight couple." I am supposing you are a Catholic deacon; if I am incorrect, forgive me. However, the answer to your question is very simple and has been the clear teaching of the Catholic Church, marriage is for the procreation of the human race (cf. Genesis). Once you know this, then you can tell the sodomites (or lesboes) that they are out of line about marriage. Their "method" of sex doesn't result in procreation.
"...so they’ll bully the Immigration bureuacrats to allow them to adopt third world children who will then undoubtedly grow up to become delinquents who’ll clog up our prison system 20 years from now."
Always good to have a splash of Gervaiseic acid with my morning coffee. This is good preparation for when, as it surely will, my daily ration of the stuff that people who don't read Chronicles can't tell from Shinola comes down the pike.
"I don’t begrudge them the legislated benefits granted the married–inheritance, hospital privileges, power of attorney..."
Mr. Olson, while your instinct for fairness is all well and good, I'm sure you've noticed by now that life is not fair. People are born one sex or the other, and have to live with the consequences. One of the consequences is that you may not marry one of your own sex. Put another way, if you want to marry, you must find a way to locate, attract, woo, appease the relatives of, and then put up with, someone of the opposite sex. When, after all the anguish of decades of trial and error as a single, I finally managed to make it into the ranks of the married, I was not amused to find that institution in such a state of neglect by those who one would think would be its defenders, i.e. clergy, the already married, politicians, letter writers and pundits calling themselves "conservative", etc. The neglect and loss of marriage's once exalted status are difficult, but not impossible, to accept. Watching two women put children in a car as I and my wife do the same and having one of them brazenly stroll up to me in unmistakeable "guys talking guy stuff" style and complain about her "wife's" parking ability: no, sir; that is too much. To get taken down a peg or two on my way to the grave is one thing. To have my hard-won status as husband and father reduced to being considered no better than that of a perverted woman with a couple of someone else's children and someone who should be someone's wife in tow, because the government mandates they must be treated "fairly": shall I count the ways I begrudge this fate?
I agree, Mr. Jacobi, that life isn't fair. It isn't fair, perhaps, that marriage is losing its civil definition in the West as the union of one man and one woman, but that is what's happening. It is hard to see how to stop or reverse it effectively at present.
@13, Mr. Olson: That civil definition is confusing, because it is incomplete, and therefore, I can understand why homosexuals believe they have a right to marriage (grounded, of course, in their exposition that their's is an alternate lifestyle supposedly natural). Now, those defending the idea that marriage is between just a man and a woman, must go further in their explanation: why a man and a woman. I really hate to belabor this point, but it seems that millions of Americans have lost it: because they have sexual organs which when united are the conveyance by which a new human being may be conceived. God Himself told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. This is why the homosexual perversion is metaphysically and physically incapable of marriage. Anyone who postulates that marriage between a man and a woman is just for companionship and contracepted sex is just as misplaced as the homosexual.
The USA not only is not remotely close to being a Christian nation in any meangingful sense, but it never was. The Union rather clearly was founded by an Elite that was far, far more devoted to the basic principles of necessarily anti-Christ British Masonsim and general Enlightenment principles than to orthodox Christianity.
Anyone, therefore, whose 'conservatism' hankers to turn back the clock to the Founders and their 18th century Englishness is at best a naive tool of those Leftists he would oppose, for the telos of British Masonism is exactly the hellhole into which we are heading.
It's only a matter of time before state legislatures pass laws allowing women to marry dolphins.
Well, I am certainly open to a deeper understanding of mermaids but your post reminded me of an out of print book by Columbia University Press, THE WAY DOWN AND OUT, written by one of my old college professors, John Senior. He saw this whole sorry state of affairs which we are now enduring, coming down the pike years ago and attempted to do something about it within his own profession. Of course he ultimately failed in the eyes of the world and was sentenced to "death by administration" which one of his colleagues described as akin to "being nibbled to death by ducks." These attack ducks leave the same type of marks wherever they go and I am sure Dr. Wilson, Tom Fleming, and the other Chronicle contributors are quite familiar with their methods. David Frum's article over at NRO a few years ago about unpatriotic conservatives was of that variety but I hate to speak only about him because their are large flocks of them everywhere these days, and as you say they will eventually marry with almost any creature so long as there is something in it for them.
Egalitarianism is the true American religion today, at least the religion of a voting majority. Watch for homosexual "marriage" to run the gamut of Left-Wing states- the rest of New England, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Delaware, the Pacific coast, the upper Mid-West and Hawaii. And, with homosexual "marriage" entrenched, look for polygamy sometime in the next decade or so. How can an egalitarian argue against the marriage of a man to two different women as long as the women were not coerced?
We are at a point where honest conservatives must admit that there is little to conserve in modern America. It is best we turn our backs on a declining, degenerate nation, conserve what is good when we are able, and create new realities like the early Christians did when faced with the wretchedness of Rome. To really care that the Republicans and the neo-conservatives get back into office to "save the republic" is self-torment in the extreme.
Derek,
I think you are correct. Polygamy and more marriages of any type will stimulate the economy, especially the divorce courts, also they will expand the Dept of Human Services, the construction trades by building more detention facilities for the youth immersed in this nihilism, the auto industry for more beefed up security patrols and the increased transportation of serving legal papers, and perhaps will even help the flagging Las Vegas marriage parlor business since Paris Hilton went to rehab. As Mr. Bush was always fond of saying before bad things got much worse,"Bring'em on!!!"
Watching two women put children in a car as I and my wife do the same and having one of them brazenly stroll up to me in unmistakeable “guys talking guy stuff” style and complain about her “wife’s” parking ability: no, sir; that is too much.
This is a moment which should have been video-cameraed!
I read your article several times and I still do not understand why same sex marriage is so hard to fathom.
Those who seek to marry do so,not because of children neccessarily,or some long generational ideal;-but they marry to have companionship,support,and unconditional love of another-to grow old together and to be there for one another in sickness and health.
I am a married woman still in love with my husband of 28 years. We rely on each other and spend time together because we want to -has it all been joy and roses? No way - there are always thorns but we have weathered all the storms,losses,grief,and hardships together.
We have children - and one day they too may marry - who they marry is not up to us nor is it up to anyone else but themselves. Whether they marry,co-habitate,or live single will be their choice and we will love them regardless.
Marriage,not defined by any religion,but the state confers on the partners certain rights that are important. To make health decisions for each other should one fall too ill,to inherit,to file joint taxes,and to have free and easy visitation in the hospital. Without a marriage certificate from the state any family member can intervene and stop any one of these things from taking place. A gay couple is faced with an incredible amount of legal hassels just to do as every other couple takes for granted.
It boggles my mind when I hear religious people denounce that which they clearly refuse to comprehend. There is no danger to anyone's family if a gay couple chooses to marry - state marriage is NOT the same as a relgious marriage - one can have both or only a civil ceremony -in matters of civil marriage no church has the right to intervene. Refuse to marry gays in your churches all you want but do not expect gay men and women not to have as much right to the legal protections of marriage as you or I.
I am a Canadian and guess what? Since gay marriage has been legalized nothing has happened to heterosexual marriage in this country - no one has been FORCED to marry a gay person nor has any church been forced to marry gay people. It is up to the individual churches to decide.
Christianity is supposed to be about love and forgiveness and helping the less fortunate but all I see is anger and fear.
Sad that really.
K Palmer
Proud Canadian
Mr Murchison ably expresses the Paranoid Style, in which a change in status of 1% of the population is an event of grave danger. The world will move on, and in 25 years people will wonder what the fuss was about.
@21, K Palmer: Christianity is about revealed truth given to mankind by our Savior, Jesus Christ. It is about how to live out these truths on earth so that we can save our souls for all eternity. Basically, love is wishing someone the best, and the best is heaven. To truly love a homosexual one would be obligated to inform the homosexual that he is living in a sin that leads to hell. True love for the homosexual would be to guide him to Christ in the Catholic Church and hope and pray for his conversion to the Christian life. You don't really love the homosexual when you condone his perversion. All of your bleating is for naught.
Is anyone really so naive to think that the end of the matter is giving social sanction to homosexual "marriage." What will happen to the "gay activists" if they were granted 100% marital rights? They will then move on to the next stage. I am not sure what that would be but it certainly will involve propagandizing in the public schools and attempts to shut up Christians (and any others) who oppose the perversion. Sermons about homosexuality will become "hate speech" and churches will lose their tax exempt status. Perhaps we can even move to a higher level of civilization by putting in jail anyone who even says anything bad about homosexual practice, as some of our European brethren do to those who even raise the question of how many Jews died in WW II, as "holocaust deniers." Perhaps parents who teach their children the truth about marriage will have their children taken away from them because of "child abuse." Far out? Don't bet the farm on it.
Mrs. Palmer,
Congratulations on remaining married 28 years, and on still loving your husband. As a husband of eleven years now, I appreciate, though probably not nearly enough, how hard a wife has to work to keep love alive.
With all due respect, however, I wonder how anyone who values marriage as much as you evidently do can be mystified by the anger gay "marriage" stirs in the hearts of traditional conservatives and probably quite a few non-conservatives as well. It is certainly not because we fail to "fathom" it! It sounds to me rather that it is you who fail to understand it and just what is at stake here.
What does it matter that many people marry for the reasons you cite and for children secondarily or not at all? The purpose of the institution of marriage as it has been known and esteemed at least since early Roman times, if I recall Thomas Fleming's recent article correctly, has been primarily the procreation, rearing and legitimization of children. It is not "any religion" that has defined marriage thus, though Christianity's elevation of it to sacramental status strengthened it, at least until lately. It has assumed this meaning and this privileged status because it has been the repository of the hopes and dreams of the overwhelming majority of mankind, who naturally want to create an especially secure environment in which to bring forth children. It is not that churches and religious folk want to "intervene" in civil marriages; it's that gay "marriage", whether civil or churched, perpetrates home invasion on traditional marriage by cheapening and mocking it. What I truly don't fathom is how some normal people such as yourself can't feel this in their bones. How is it that you can feel such sympathy for these hardly insurmountable inconveniences (no joint taxes!) to homosexuals and yet apparently none for the probably irreversible harm this travesty does to the identity and social status of men and women like you and me. As I allude to in my post @12 above, getting properly married, as opposed to shacking up or absent-mindedly marrying the first person with whom you find sexual bliss, can be one of life's most difficult challenges for some of us; it should come as no surprise then that we cherish and are fiercely proprietary of the titles and roles of husband, father, wife and mother. And surely there are many for whom getting married was not so hard who feel the same way. Yet now, to satisfy the egoistic cravings of 1% or 2% of the population for something that they are eminently unqualified for, we are supposed to make nice while rubbing shoulders at the PTA, ballpark, etc., with women who act like husbands and men who act like wives. They act out their grotesque burlesque of the roles that belong to us and we are supposed to smile and shuffle and say yes, ma'am, or else master in a black robe will convict us of a hate crime. And what about those who might have contemplated marriage, perhaps including one of your children, who will now turn away from it as its status sinks in tandem with its ever-lowering bar to entry? This will result in more illegitimate children growing up amid a passing parade of live-in boyfriends and girlfriends instead of one father and one mother. Is this is an acceptable price to pay so that Tom and Dick can call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Tom and Dick?
Happy Mother's Day!
@22, Jack:
It is the change for the worse in the status of the other 99%, that is being effected by the mischief of that 1%, that is, indeed, a grave danger for society. As fewer people bother to marry, partly because of the cabaret show gay "marriage" has made of the institution, all of society suffers.
Got a college degree, Jack? Would you be talking in "the Paranoid Style" if you objected to my demand for one, even though I don't have the required credits, on the grounds that I read a lot and think deep thoughts?